Are You Working on Your Brand?
Graduations season brings many speeches. Most will focus on the fact that graduates have their whole life ahead of them and can accomplish whatever they set their minds to, with hard work and dedication. I had the pleasure of attending my nephew’s high school graduation and while many speeches touched on the expected subject matter, the speech that I found most inspiring was the one delivered by my nephew’s school superintendent, who took a slightly different tact in his spe
Breaking down Departmental Silos within your Club
As the new year is upon us and many look to make resolutions for the coming year, I recommend instituting, or improving a Department Head Retreat. RCS Hospitality Group recently hosted a webinar on the importance and value associated with creating a strong governance culture with the correct use of board and committee orientations. In that webinar, I touched briefly on a similar orientation for senior leaders/department heads--Let's dig a little deeper into this exercise, If
Employee Training & Retention Trend Report: Part 2
Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series authored by RCS owner & president Whitney Reid Pennell for 2018, intended to help club managers and hospitality professionals understand the current obstacles in employee retention and training. Part One can be read here. Part One of this series on trends in employee retention and training discussed what obstacles are currently being faced by hospitality professionals and why they have occurred. Let's continue. What is bein
Employee Training & Retention Trend Report: Part 1
If you're in the hospitality business, you probably already know that the food and beverage industry has the highest turnover rate of an
How Professional Photography Can Serve Your Club
These are all good reasons to consider having new golf course photography done, but like any other element of your marketing communications
Should You Send Your (Sacred) Cows to Pasture?
An earlier version of this article was originally published in BoardRoom Magazine in 2014. Author Marc Goben, in his book Brandjam, makes a case for emotional branding suggesting that brands today must shift from communications and commodities to emotion and inspiration. If we want to touch people on an emotional level we must find ways to reach people individually to fulfill their emotional needs. Happy club members will continue to patronize where they feel welcome, comfort
A Service “Blueprint” Helps Build a Great Member Experience
Here’s a familiar sight at every golf club: Long-time members arrive, eager for a relaxing day on the course. Their tee time comes up, and after stopping in the golf shop for their cart reservation, they go out to the first tee to begin their round. They’re cheerfully greeted (by name!) by the staff, led to their cart, which is clean and charged and ready to go, and a great day of golfing begins. It’s precisely this seamless scenario that led them to join this club in the fir
Five Steps to Reaping Rewards of a Strong Service Culture
“If you don’t get culture right, nothing else matters.” John Taft, CEO, RBC Wealth Management The word “culture” has many meanings. For most people, it refers to a community’s shared tastes and values, including things like social norms, music choices, food and fashion preferences, sports loyalties, religious beliefs, and many other mores and customs. Sometimes communities with a shared culture are specific to one particular location; sometimes they exist in many places at on
Is the Design of Your Club Costing You?
The past two weeks I have been writing about the need to involve operations in the operational planning stage of a renovation, in Part 1 and Part 2 of the "The Importance of Strategic Architectural Design in Club Operations" series. If you haven't given those a read yet, I encourage you to do so! Today I'd like to take a quick look at what involving operations in the planning stage of a renovation means for your numbers, so you can really understand what poor design could be
Engaging with Adult Learners
As a manager, training is an inescapable part of your responsibilities, and unlike teaching wherein your audience is usually children chances are you will be working with adult learners. Engaging with adult learners has its own unique set of challenges. When you train adults, there is a greater need for mutual respect and for the learners to find the trainer credible with enough character authority to teach them something new. Once the trainer has established their skills an
